AVRUPA RESİM SANATINDA ÖLÜMCÜL KADIN FİGÜRLER
FATAL WOMEN FIGURES IN THE EUROPE PAINTING

Summary/Abstract: Important proof of the existence of the figures of “femme fatale/fatal women” which are a fiction of patriarchal thinking and have an important place in the European art history between the ninth century and 1980. Women had the status of Mother Goddess in the oldest periods of human history due to their contribution to clan economy since they were collectors, since they were able to heal patients because they knew nature and because they ensured the continuation of humanity by giving birth. The fact that shepherd communities gained dominance over farmer communities resulted in the establishment of the first class structure in history. People being classified as the ruling and the ruled paved the way for the development of patriarchal thinking, and women began to be dethroned from being queens and creators. This change was reflected in the rituals of Mesopotamian civilizations and transferred to Greek and Roman mythologies, the basis of the European way of thinking. Women’s secondary position is shown in these mythologies through “femme fatale/fatal woman” characters such as Medea, Clytemnestra and Medusa. After the Roman Empire declared Christianity its official religion, the misogyny that also affected Jewish and Christian holy writings was maintained with the characters such as Eve, Salome and Judith in the Gothic paintings of the Middle Ages when Scholastic thought was dominant. The Greek and Roman myths and the stories of the Old and New Testaments, two important sources of the history of European painting, also significantly affected female figures in the compositions of Renaissance Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo and New Classicism by attributing negative meanings to them. Patriarchal thinking was also prominent in Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Nouveau, Pre-Raphaelites, Surrealism, Cubism, Primitivism and the twentieth century. In these modern periods when artists began to become free or became free, it became even stronger and played a role in the formation of the figures of femme fatale/fatal woman.

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